Fires are a serious problem today. Large fires rage out of control sweeping through woods/forests, communities, industrial areas (e.g., refineries, power plants, etc.) and businesses resulting in tremendous loss of forests/woods, homes, other property, animals and even human life. Efforts employed to contain fires are not always successful. Controlling and preventing the spread of fires is often a difficult and dangerous undertaking.
There are presently accepted methods and techniques for controlling and preventing the spread of fires. These methods include traditional uses of firefighters and equipment, including such techniques as the dumping of large amounts of water or fire suppressing chemicals from aircrafts onto the fire, creating fire lines across the direction of travel of the fire, spraying water or fire suppressing chemicals onto the fire by firefighters on the ground, and back burning an area towards the fire in a controlled manner so as to effectively remove wood or other sources of fuel from an approaching fire.
Water and chemicals are often ineffective against fires. In particular, at times the fire's intensity is so great that the water or chemicals evaporate or disintegrate before reaching the core of the fire. This is true whether the water or chemicals are dropped or sprayed over the top of the fire, or are sprayed directly into the fire. The water or chemicals thus do little to put out the fire. Further, some fire retardant chemicals damage the environment and ecosystem. Therefore, there is clearly a need to douse fires by materials other than water or chemicals and a need to reduce the temperature of the fire so that water and/or chemicals can be effective.
Presently accepted methods for fighting fires have an additional disadvantage, as they are designed only to extinguish the flames and not to stop the forward progress of the fire. Simply dousing the fire with water or chemicals from above will do nothing to stop a fire's progress. This often renders them ineffective in fighting quickly spreading fires, such as a wind-blown forest or brush fire. Therefore, there is also a need for a method of halting the forward progress of a moving fire and preventing it from spreading until it is extinguished.